Monday, February 6, 2006 PHL 105Y - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Monday, February 6, 2006 PHL 105Y. For Wednesday, finish reading Saul Kripke’s “A Priori Knowledge, Necessity and Contingency” (pages 249-257 in the Pojman) For tutorial this Friday, answer one of the following questions:

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Kripke thinks that there is a possible world in which the words “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” name two different heavenly bodies, but no possible world in which Hesperus and Phosphorus are different things. Explain.

In addition to the posted topics (on Moore and Russell), here’s a further topic to choose:

According to A. J. Ayer, to say that the world of sense-experience is unreal is to say something ‘not even false but nonsensical’. (152) Why does Ayer think so? How compelling are his arguments in support of this claim?

What we do in making a moral judgment is express our feelings (we are not, for example, describing a special layer of reality – the realm of moral truths; we are not even describing our own feelings, or expressing propositions about those feelings – that would be subjectivism)

These expressions of feeling serve to arouse feelings in others, and to move them to action as well

According to Ayer, those who claim to have mystical religious experiences are revealing something meaningful about their own psychology, but if they cannot formulate their claims about God in empirically verifiable terms they are not saying anything meaningful about reality

Ayer is convinced that claims about a transcendent God can never be made in empirically verifiable terms (transcendent = beyond earthly experience)

There is a possible world in which it rained today, a possible world in which you were hit by a car last November, a possible world in which Paul Martin won the last election, even a possible world in which the NDP won the last election

There is no possible world in which circles are square. There is a possible world in which you are taller than you are now; there is a possible world in which you are very athletic; there is a possible world in which you parents named you “Michael Jordan”; but there is no possible world in which youare Michael Jordan. (Why not?)